The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

substance, these bars. The light of the hidden sun reflected on earth by the moon and casting only shadows. And yet they locked Hau in, as securely as if they were steel. Like fingers reaching through the darkness, they held him in their grip. It was his fear that gave them their power. The power to back him up against the wall, knees pulled into his chin, arms folded around his shins. He pulled his legs in tight as though he might somehow be able to make himself so small as to be invisible.

The night was hot and humid, but still he shivered. A broken shutter hung down across the window in the breathless dark, swinging slowly back and forth. At first he was puzzled by its motion. There was not a whisper of movement in the air. What magical energy was there at work, what hidden fingers tipping the shutters to and fro on rusted hinges? The breath of what invisible demon stirred the still night air? He wanted to scream. To shatter the fragile peace of the night. But he could raise no sound in his throat. He closed his eyes and felt hunger gnawing at his stomach like some devil eating him from the inside out. The whole room tilted towards him now.

He had found his old home as dawn broke. A pale misted dawn that allowed the world to etch itself with only a pastel imprecision upon the day. A tracery of cracks had opened up across the suburban streets, grass and weeds poking up through broken kerbstones. Once grand villas, set in secluded grounds, lay dilapidated as the first tendrils of primeval jungle reached up through devastated gardens to reclaim what man had so recently stolen and now abandoned. The house seemed only faintly familiar, a dream of a previous life. Windows and shutters had been smashed, doors ripped off. Everything of value had been taken, everything else destroyed. Every conceivable hiding place had been sought out, floorboards torn up, walls smashed. And then this broken monument to defeated imperialism had been left to rot.

Hau had shuffled despondently through the rubble, from room to room, trailing his automatic rifle on the floor behind him, hope draining from him with every step. Home – that place he had always held in his memory safe and inviolate, nourished with thoughts of his mother and father and Ny, the one place in the world he could escape to – no longer existed. Home, he realized as he stumbled through the devastation, was not a place. It was the people who filled it. And the emptiness he now found in what had once been his home cut deep into his soul, like the jagged edge of a blunt razor, bringing the searing realization that he had no home, no family, no place to go.

Now, he opened his eyes in the dark, heart pounding, the room still tilting him this way and that. And he realized that it was not the room that tilted back and forth. Nor the shutter swinging in the still air. It was his own movement as he rocked gently from heel to toe. And, suddenly, it seemed a warm, comforting movement.

He saw his AK-47 lying abandoned on the floor where he had dropped it. It seemed a strange, hard, metallic thing. A toy in a catalogue. How could such an inanimate object take life? Of course, he knew, it couldn’t. Not on its own. It took him, or anyone with a will, to pull the trigger. It took intent. It took malice or jealousy or fear or greed. And he had had such intent. At once he felt shame and anger and hurt at this knowledge, and he kicked out at the rifle, sending it clattering across the room. But he could still see it in the moonlight, staring back at him, reproachful, accusing.

He picked up the dusty, threadbare teddy that lay beside him and clutched it to his breast. He’d found it lying torn and broken in a corner of what had once been his bedroom. It brought an instant comfort. It shared all his secrets, all his fears. He buried his face in its fur and immediately smelled something disturbingly familiar. It took him a moment to realize it was himself that he smelled. A smell so familiar it frightened him, unlocking a door on the past, on a lost innocence, on the boy he had once been. Who was he now? He squeezed the teddy tight. Tears sprang from his eyes, salty and stinging, and he wondered how long it would take him to die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Four tiny figures moved with the infinitesimal speed of crippled time along a stone causeway flanked at exact intervals by pairs of seven-headed serpents. Above them rose the towers of the wat, the moon casting their shadows long and deep, the still mildewed lakes spanned by the causeway drowning their reflections. Elliot carried Slattery over his shoulder. He felt blood soaking through his fatigues, life ebbing from the dying weight. Behind him, the smack of bare feet on cool stone, Serey leaning heavily on the arm of her daughter. The gentle clatter of McCue’s webbing as he moved slowly backwards, eyes focused into the dark of the trees whose shelter they had left, seemed to fill the hot damp air. Behind them lay only darkness and silence. Ahead lay the towering emptiness of the wat, and beyond that the watery vastness of the Tonle Sap. The sheer size of everything that lay around them, that was against them, reinforced their sense of smallness.

‘We shall be safe in the temple,’ Serey had said. ‘The Lord Buddha will protect us.’ Ny wondered why the Lord Buddha had failed to protect them from the Khmer Rouge for four years.

But Elliot felt drawn to the temples, felt an unaccountable sadness at the imminent loss of his friend. At the loss of all the lives he had taken. Of all the